For a long moment she said nothing and Cat wondered if Granny was purposely keeping something from her. Finally, she patted the arm of her chair.

‘Come here, child,’ she sighed. ‘It’s high time I told you a story.’ Cat clambered on, swinging her legs across her Granny’s lap the way she had done when she was small. She was getting too big for that now, she thought.

When she was settled, Granny began to talk in the sing-song voice of hers that Cat always found so comforting.

‘Did I ever tell you about my friend Nancy?’

Cat shook her head. The name wasn’t familiar.

‘That’s a failing on my part. I should have told you this when we first discovered you had the Sight. I just hoped … well, we’ll get to that. Let me start at the beginning. When I was about your age, I had a friend named Nancy and we were as close as yourself and that Culligan boy–’

‘I am not friends with Shane,’ Cat interrupted and blushed when Granny fixed her with a withering stare. She wanted to argue, but she knew it wouldn’t do any good. Granny wouldn’t understand that some things couldn’t be fixed.

‘As I was saying … Nancy and myself were the best of friends. We did everything together. My mammy even used to joke that we were attached at the hip. She lived in an old farmhouse outside of town that was knocked down … oh, it must be twenty years ago when the council built that bypass,’ Granny’s voice grew angry. She had a lot of disdain for the county council.

‘Before that blasted road was built there was nothing around Clonbridge but miles and miles of fields and forests and hills. Myself and Nancy liked nothing better than to go exploring them. We’d come home up to our eyeballs in muck and were the bane of our poor mammies’ existence.

‘One day, when we were out on one of our wanders, we found an old ringfort hidden on top of a hill deep in Cullane Wood.’

‘I know that place!’ said Cat. ‘I visited it with my class last year.’ She remembered trudging up the hill with the rest of her class while her teacher droned on about Bronze Age settlements and the important archaeological discoveries that were found there.

‘Oh, it’s a popular enough spot now,’ Granny continued, ‘but people were more superstitious back then. Ringforts were considered unlucky, and most people were wise enough to leave them well alone. But myself and Nancy were young and curious so of course we went exploring right away, clambering all over the place and sticking our noses into every nook and cranny. Sure, what was it to us only a circle of stone atop a mound of earth? Well, we were soon to learn different. All our nosing around woke something that day, I’m sure of it.

‘You have to understand that I hadn’t yet discovered my Sight, if I had I would have run screaming from the place and never returned, but as it was, it was only a feeling I had. It felt as though we were being watched from the shadows. And there was this smell … damp and rotten. Nancy thought I was being silly; she never believed the stories the old folk told us and she had fallen in love with the peace and quiet of the place. Being the youngest of eight siblings, I suppose that was understandable enough. She couldn’t wait to go back and refused to believe me when I told her I wouldn’t set foot in that ringfort again for love nor money. It was the only falling out myself and Nancy ever had. She told me to stop being a baby and said if I wouldn’t go back with her then she would go herself. So that’s what she did.